A celebration of the daily triumphs and tribulations of researchers everywhere

time management

The converging of research projects in this world is almost as disastrous as a Great Planetary Conjunction in other worlds. Image: greatconjunction.tumblr.com

Timing is the greatest challenge with natural products. No matter how beautifully constructed an experimental design and the hours that go into planning each experiment, inevitably Nature will come along and mess it all up. This week, despite my well-constructed project proposals with suitable distances between each set of analyses, I’ve ended up with three large projects converging on a single analytical time point.

Two projects are just kicking off thanks to harvest times coming together and one is the final time point of an existing project and none of them have any rights to be invading on the other.

After my inevitable melt down that came with the Great Realisation of the Impending Conjunction and the subsequent hours of therapy, I’ve realised that things might not be as bad as they seem. The key to controlling such as dilemma always comes back to the basic principles of Do, Delegate or Delete.

Ideally, I’d like to Do everything. This is mostly because I have a few control issues and difficulty letting go but that’s a topic for a-whole-nother therapy session. In this case I simply can’t do everything without sacrificing a few things, like sleep. And that’s not happening. So, grudgingly, I will prioritise the very long list of analyses and do only those in the absolutely-essential-must-be-done-now category.

Other tasks will have to be Delegated to colleagues who might have a spare moment from their own trials to run a few samples for me. Usually the analysis itself isn’t difficult, just time consuming, and unfortunately that’s something I’m short on. Borrowing some minutes from other people is enormously beneficial to me and not a burden on them, kind of like crowd-funding for time.

Delegating to work experience students might also be an option. Piling work on an unsuspecting student is apparently fine as long as the forms say ‘work experience’ and not ‘slave labour’, even if the latter is more accurate. Not that I’ve tried this yet, but at the moment, anything is looking good. And I’m sure the experience will be enjoyable for the student in an eye-opening, real-life experience kind of way.

As for anything else that can’t be met in the required timeframe for analysis, it might have to be Deleted from the to do list. This is where prioritisation is critical. Do I really need to measure everything possible just because I can?

In these days of being able to measure absolutely everything, we really need to assess if it is worth the amount of work if nothing is significantly different. So maybe I can cull a few experiments or samples and only look at only the most influential without compromising the integrity of the experimental design. Not that I’d actually dispose of those other samples, just in case there was a difference. I would need more a lot more therapy to get over that kind of trauma.

Things are looking much less stressful now with my new and improved planning strategy for the Great Project Conjunction. I might even have time for a coffee.